There are some great training opportunities for local IT professionals who are looking at up skilling in SharePoint. 3grow are hosting a great training event in Auckland late August for SharePoint Architects and System Administrators by way of a great 5 day hands on boot camp event with Steve Smith of Combined Knowledge and Spencer Harbar facilitating the class. Check out the training modules and registration details here. If you are looking for Information Architecture and Planning then Paul Culmsee is hosting his SPGOV+IA class in Auckland and Wellington! TechED 2011 New Zealand If you are attending TechED NZ watch out for some great sessions on SharePoint. This will be my fifth year speaking at TechED. My session will be on SharePoint High Availability Solutions. As usual I will provide a series of article leading onto and post Tec ...[Read More]

There are many courses/classes that claim to “Teach Information Architecture and SharePoint” however these are full of platitudes and usually is delivered in a 1 day and tries to cover complex topics and end up being a complete waste of time. Recently some readers on my blog commented and asked me on why it’s hard to implement an information architecture with SharePoint. The reality is if you listen to someone talking and putting IA into a box then you are pretty much on the wrong track. Which is what most classes try to do and end up having more confused participants at the end. I’ve always looked at SharePoint IA in a complete different view. And this is a common shared view with some of my good friends in the community. In particular Paul Culmsee from Cleverworkarounds/Seven Sigma who has developed a very unique approach to “how do I ...[Read More]

This is something I am quite excited about! There are some great resources for anyone wanting to know about what Office365 offers. I’m going to point to some must read information for Developers, IT Pros and Business Users. For Developers Office365 Developer Training Kit - http://bit.ly/sp365devkit SharePoint Online Developer Resource Centre (MSDN) - http://bit.ly/sponlinedev Office 365 Developer Training Modules - http://bit.ly/office365dev For System Administrators (IT Pros) Office365 Jump Start Videos - http://bit.ly/office365ITPro  (Videos from 3 days of sessions) Office365 PowerShell Administration - http://bit.ly/office365powershell  Deploying Office Professional for Office365 - http://bit.ly/office365OfficePro Planning Centres (MSDN and TechNet) Planning for SharePoint Online - http://bit.ly/sponline ...[Read More]

Although I’ve not been able to blog as frequently as I liked I've managed to be part of the ever growing NZ SharePoint community and the wider overseas SharePoint communities. The Wellington SharePoint user group is still going strong after all these years. Somewhat up and down in the experienced vs newbies recently but there is still interest and regular attendance by regular users of SharePoint. One of the main things that I have experienced is that there are more and more “new” users who are getting introduced to SharePoint and who are looking to learn the basics. Some of the feedback we’ve had also indicates that people are looking for beginning SharePoint content more and more! Anyways what I wanted to write about is the fact that I have been a MVP for the last five years! Today I received  a special ‘token’ for being a Microsoft ...[Read More]

If you haven’t yet heard the New Zealand SharePoint community is hosting its third SharePoint Conference in Wellington on March 16th and 17th! If you are working on anything related to SharePoint then this is the place to be. As usual some of the worlds best SharePoint experts are speaking at the event and you also get to learn about what’s been happening locally. This conference is by the community for the community and with a ticket price of just $700 for two full days of content it more than delivers on a range of speciality areas and topics. Some of the highlights for this year are: Community Challenge 2011 – A full SharePoint solution conceptualised, designed and delivered in two days right at the conference! Customer Immersion Experience – Try out all the integrated technologies for a complete solution on the Microsoft Produ ...[Read More]

Via the team @knowledgecue and @ckukltd you can get hold of this step by step guide. This is a collaborative effort with Steve Smith of Combined Knowledge (UK). Steve runs a unique training class aimed for Infrastructure administrators who want to know about SharePoint in depth and this is one of the many module from that class. Remote Blob Storage (RBS) is a capability of SQL server 2008 and 2008R2 that can be used to offload content stored in databases to the file system. The guide covers the following three scenarios. Setup and configure FILESTREAM and RBS for a new content database. Configure RBS for an existing content database and site collection. Disable RBS from a content database. Download the guide from the Knowledge Cue team site - Configuring Remote Blob Storage for SharePoint ...[Read More]

If you’ve followed some of my previous posts and presentations on SharePoint upgrade or are about to plan an Upgrade the following Video (link below) would be of interest. The video is from the Microsoft IT team who conducted the internal Microsoft SharePoint upgrade. Some of the key points for any successful upgrade are discussed in the video: detect issues early by learning about the deployment communications with site owners/administrators no data loss minimal downtime Initial Best Practices and Lessons Learned from Microsoft IT SharePoint 2010 Upgrade (Video) Managing a Parallel Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 (Video) Upgrade Planning and Best Practices - TechNet Upgrade Resource Centre – TechNet Remember the more you know about the deployment the better the upgrade experience is. I’ve done many upgrades and it’s unique in e ...[Read More]

Since the release of SharePoint Server 2010 (RTM) in April 2010 the following Cumulative Updates have been released. Current SharePoint Server updates - latest to oldest highlighted. December 2010 – SharePoint Server KB 2459257 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2459257/ December 2010 – SharePoint Foundation KB - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2459125/en-us October 2010 – SharePoint Server KB 2394320 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2394320/ August 2010 – SharePoint Server KB 2352342 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2352342 (Note that with this release there are additional updates for Project Server and FAST Search Server). June 2010 – SharePoint Server KB 983497 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983497 (Multiple) For most deployments which are operational these updates should (is recommended to) be applied on a regular ...[Read More]